There is now something of a polarization in the performance of medieval music. On the one hand are those who continue to favour the colourful approach of the 1960s, with a wide range of exotic or reproduction instruments, drums, quick tempos and careful concern not to repeat any single combination of instruments within a single concert or record; and there are those who feel that such performances are not only difficult to justify historically but liable to hide the difference between one piece and the next, that is that they allow a slightly dubious 'spirit of the age' to come before the individual qualities that make a particular piece worth performing or hearing. Regular readers will know that I tend to favour the latter viewpoint, as does most musicological opinion (for what that may be worth). But these matters are never simple. And they become particularly difficult in considering the Libre Vermell, or ''Red Book of Montserrat'', a collection of ten fourteenth-century pilgrim songs. Some of the music here is apparently for dancing and may be in a sense communal; but three of the polyphonic works in the collection, though simple, are relatively close to the courtly song style of France and Northern Italy. Briefly, this is an unusual and isolated collection that might well reflect a popular tradition in fourteenth-century Spain.
Presumably with that possibility in mind, the Berry Hayward ensemble adopt the more colourful approach to medieval music except in that they eschew solo singers: they use a chorus of men and women singing in octaves rather in the manner of the Dessoff Choirs under Paul Boepple. To add further colour and variety they include four unrelated pieces: a splendid improvisation on the zarb (darabukka) and three estampies (of which the last, for the record, is the famous Retrove from the Robertsbridge Codex). The seven skilled instrumentalists include a truly magnificent harpist in Francois Johannel and a fine drummer in Bruno Caillat. Between them they produce some fascinating instrumental sounds, including the mouth-watering combination of three renaissance recorders and a harp in the canonic Laudemus Virginem.'